Book looks at life and times of Fred Wentworth

Thursday

Feb 7, 2013 at 3:15 AM

DOVER — Architect Fred Wesley Wentworth, who grew up in Dover and is buried in Pine Hill Cemetery, is the subject of a new book, The Life & Times of Fred Wesley Wentworth: The Architect Who Shaped Paterson, NJ and Its People by Richard Polton. Polton will give a presentation about Wentworth’s life at the Dover Public Library on Monday, Feb. 25 at 7 p.m.

Wentworth, born in 1864, attended Dartmouth College and became a highly influential architect in Paterson — then known as America’s “Silk City” in reference to its successful textile industry. However, very little has been publicly known about him — until now.

Wentworth designed approximately 40 buildings in Paterson from 1890 through 1940 — everything from hospitals, elementary schools, hotels, and homes to original, groundbreaking designs for the burgeoning movie palaces of the era. During this time, Paterson was a place of movers and shakers — it was home to a Vice President of the United States, a Governor who became U.S. Attorney General, manufacturing and retail entrepreneurs, and captains of industry — and they were all clients of Fred Wesley Wentworth.

“If you lived in Paterson during the 20th century, you lived in a city built by Wentworth,” says Polton, who grew up in Paterson. “Yet I had never heard of him until I stumbled across a book of his on eBay. The more I researched his life and work, the more I was fascinated by the breadth and quality of his career, the relationships he formed with his clients, and the enormous changes he witnessed in Paterson during his lifetime.”

Born in Boxborough, Massachusetts in 1864 while his father was temporarily working there to procure lumber for the shipbuilding industry, Wentworth was raised and educated in Dover. His father, William Trickey Wentworth, was born in Hiram, Maine in 1822, but spent most of his adult life in Dover. He owned Long Hill Farm, a successful dairy farm a mile outside of town. The elder Wentworth was active in politics, serving as a selectman, a school commissioner, a councilman, an alderman and a state legislator. Fred Wesley Wentworth’s mother was Lucinda Phipps (MacDonald) Wentworth, born in New Hampshire and from a well-established local family.

Early in his career, Wentworth designed the Lucius Everett Varney residence in Dover, which still stands today. Built in 1905, it is among the grandest homes in Wentworth’s portfolio. Lucius Varney was a classmate of Wentworth’s at Dartmouth College. Varney practiced patent law in New York City, but called Dover home. Both men were members of the Casque & Gauntlet Society at Dartmouth, and both are buried in Pine Hill Cemetery in Dover.

Among Wentworth’s most significant clients was Jacob Fabian, a Jewish entrepreneur and entertainment industry mogul. Together the two pioneered the design of movie palaces, making six in New Jersey, including the one of the grandest movie theater designs, the Stanley Theater in Jersey City, still intact today. Their long-standing collaboration also resulted in a major synagogue and social buildings that formed Jewish life in Paterson in the early 1900s, helping a generation of immigrants become the Americans they yearned to be.

Author Richard Polton, who lives in New Jersey, is a founding principal of Value Research Group, a real estate valuation and consulting firm and he specializes in issues of affordable housing and urban redevelopment. He studied American history at Columbia, architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and city planning at MIT. He is also on the board of trustees of the Hamilton Partnership for Paterson, a nonprofit organization helping to launch the Paterson Great Falls National Park. He readily acknowledges that he envies Wentworth’s extraordinary accomplishments.

“The opportunity Wentworth had to create so many types of buildings, and to be able to handle such a wide range of complex technical issues in a period when the basics of modern technology — electricity, telephones, radios — were only emerging, is inspiring,” says Polton.

With more than 130 photos detailing the Wentworth-designed buildings and events during his lifetime, The Life and Times of Fred Wesley Wentworth uncovers a forgotten history of one of the most overlooked but influential architects of New Jersey’s past.